2006 IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award: Prof. Christos Faloutsos

The IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award is given to one individual or one group who has made influential contributions to the field of data mining. The 2006 IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award goes to Prof. Christos Faloutsos of Carnegie Mellon University.

Prof. Faloutsos has received the Presidential Young Investigator Award by the National Science Foundation (1989), eight ``best paper'' awards, (one of which in ICDM'05), and several teaching awards. He has served as a member of the executive committee of SIGKDD; PC chair for SIGMOD'99 and KDD'03; he has published over 150 refereed articles, 5 of which are in ICDM, 11 book chapters and one monograph. He holds five patents and he has given 20 tutorials and 10 invited distinguished lectures. His research interests include data mining for streams and networks, fractals, indexing for multimedia and bio-informatics data, and database performance.

Prof. Faloutsos has made several important research contributions to the data mining field in such areas as mining for graphs and streams, and indexing, searching and mining for temporal and video data. He has published several influential papers that have been heavily cited: At the time of writing, Google Scholar reports that his award-winning SIGMOD 1994 paper on time series has 582 citations. The companion paper in FODO 2003 received 650 citations, and the related paper on QBIC (query by image content) in SPIE'93 has over 1,000 citations. This family of papers introduced the GEMINI methodology for searching multimedia and time series databases, which became the norm for the field.

For graphs mining, Prof. Faloutsos discovered power laws in real graphs, and specifically in the internet topology (SIGCOMM'99), which brought a revolution to the field, attracting over 1000 citations in Google Scholar, and being the 5th most cited paper in 1999, according to CiteSeer. His work on medical images and visual vocabularies received one of the 'best student paper' awards in ICDM'05.

Overall, he is one of the most cited scholars in the Data Mining field, with a citation rank of 159 among all the computer scientists, according to CiteSeer.

2006 IEEE ICDM Nomination and Evaluation Committees


From Vijay Raghavan (raghavan AT cacs.louisiana.edu) on October 31, 2006.